Christmas 2025

This kid got glasses! It was a shocking development where he off-handedly mentioned to the pediatrician at his well-visit that he was having trouble seeing the whiteboard from the back of the room. I had never heard him mention that! He has 20/70 vision and uses his glasses mostly just for school and only to pull out at certain times. I rarely see him put them on at home.

Kari and Jared planned some new Christmas Eve games for us to try this year!

One of our Christmas presents was a family trip to Six Flags! We had a great time.

Our Christmas plan originally was a trip to Universal Studios as our entire Christmas. We planned to use Matt's Christmas bonus to off-set the cost and enjoy one last trip as a family before Caleb started his mission. The trip was booked and paid for with the itinerary of leaving the 23rd and spending the next 3 days at Universal in Florida. However, things started going badly at work for Matt where he was juggling so many balls all on his own and not able to keep it all afloat. His boss called him into the office and told Matt he wasn't working hard enough, being lazy, and thus would not receive his Christmas or year-end bonus. Matt was crushed. He had been overloaded for some time, begging them to hire more help to alleviate his load. They didn't want to spend the money. Matt was drowning putting in so much over-time to try to keep his head above water, and it was taking a toll on him emotionally, mentally, and physically. To be told he wasn't working hard enough and would lose out on his bonuses broke him. He turned in his two week's notice, which would put his ownership of the company at risk, and we canceled our trip fortunately only losing out on $200. He started lining up options for other jobs with the future unknown. His boss refused to accept the two week's notice, however, and this triggered them moving two people over from engineering to help Matt with his responsibilities. After a week, the two engineering men said it was too much work, and they couldn't keep up with their engineering responsibilities and the tasks assigned to alleviate Matt. In the end, they finally hired two new people under Matt that he could delegate responsibilities to. Matt is still not happy at work, but he keeps his head down, avoids his boss when possible and is trying to ride it out to the end and the company sells. 

When we canceled our trip, we then had to scramble to come up with Christmas presents! Caleb was easy as we were already purchasing things for his mission. It became a year of mostly gift cards as presents for everyone else, which felt lame! We also did some new family games; Six Flags was our Universal replacement. 🤣